I avoid becoming political on here but I believe in democracy, equality, and that everybody should have the freedom to live their own life the way they please as long as they are not doing something that keeps others from doing the same. I also believe in the importance of honesty, science as a way to understand what is going on in our world and decency in treating our fellow living beings, including humans.
That said, it is obvious why I can’t stay on Twitter anymore, no matter how many connections I lose by shutting down the account. And yes, I will continue to call it Twitter as long as its owner refuses to acknowledge the name change of his own daughter.
I know that many see Bluesky as the new alternative but I don’t think that’s a viable option because while theoretically decentralized, practically it is still defined by one company and, in effect, one person, and we just see with Twitter and Meta where that leads to. Instead, I will go to Mastodon, where I already created an account in 2022 when Musk took over.
You will find me as @registrartrek@glammr.us
If some of you consider the same but don’t know how to start, here are some things I learned (I am also there with another personal account since 2022):
It all starts with picking a server and this seems to be the biggest hurdle for most. You will find a list of servers here: https://joinmastodon.org/de/servers or you can look up servers that seem to suit you and create an account there. For example, if you navigate to https://glammr.us/@registrartrek you will see my feed (I wasn’t very active so far but that’s true for my professional social media in general). On the left side you see my server and what it is it about.
Mastodon is a city
The concept of “servers” sounds a bit foreign perhaps, and many people fear they will narrow their options by deciding for a server, so, let’s think of it a bit differently. Let’s say Mastodon is the city you want to move to. The servers are all the streets in this city. You look at several streets, at what other people live there, what shops are in there, what the general “atmosphere” of it is. This will be your new neighborhood so you want to make sure you will feel at home and safe there.
How can you learn about your new neighborhood? A good place to start is looking at the server rules. Those you find in the “about” section in the left hand column here:
You will see if the rules of your street and see if this looks like a description of a place you would like to live in. And of course, you might know other people who already moved into a street and talk to them about how they like it.
Once you find a street that suits you, you will move into a house there by creating an account. And you will get an address so people can reach you. My address is @registrartrek@glammr.us because I am called registrartrek and I live in glammr.us street.
Many people fear that once they picked a server, they won’t be able to follow people on another server. This isn’t true. Of course you can visit people in other streets once you moved into a city! Streets are connected to other streets so you can move around the city. The same is true for Mastodon. There is a caveat, though: you already had a look at your street/server’s rules. Your street might have decided not to build a bridge to a bad neighborhood whose inhabitants display a behavior that contradicts their rules. They might even have destroyed a bridge when it turned out that too many people from the other street came over and harassed people in your street. In Mastodon terms: the general idea is that servers federate with other servers – which means nothing else than that streets connect to other streets. But at the same time it has a long-established culture of taking care of their citizens, so every street will decide which other streets they want to connect/federate to and also to defederate (destroy the bridge) if they see behavior from another street they deem unacceptable.
Setting up your address/house
With this knowledge, you simply click on “create an account” and follow the steps just like you would do on any other social media site. There are servers that are completely open and you will get access right away. Many other servers are set up in a way you have to be either approved by the server admin or need an invite by someone who already is on the server. While this is a small hurdle it helps with keeping spammers and known harassers out. If you want an invite to my “street” glammr.us just drop me a line under story@museumsprojekte.de and I’ll send you one (due to work and other stuff I don’t know if I am really faster than the server admin, though).
By the way, you can still move to another street later. If you find out you like another street better, you can pack up your things (or your followers) and move there. There is an import/export function available.
Getting to know your neighborhood
Once you settled into your new home and hung the curtains… Heck, I don’t have to explain to you how to set up a profile on social media, right? You have done that all your life. But let’s look around and get to know your neighborhood.
On the right hand side you see “Live Feeds” and if you click on that, you have the tab “This server” that shows you all the posts from all other people who are on the same server. Meaning: the more the people, topics, and culture on the server you picked resonate with your own, the more likely you will find interesting stuff and people to follow here. If you want to explore more, you can click on “Other Servers” which will give you the posts of all servers connected to your own, so, basically the chatter of all the people in all the other streets – minus the ones your street has burned the bridge to. If this is still not enough, the “All” tab shows you EVERYTHING that is going on on all the servers everywhere, so the whole Mastodon city. Ugh, that’s too much, let’s click back to your own timeline, which you see if you click on “Home”.
When you just have settled into your new home, this timeline will be empty. It will fill up with the posts from people and hashtags you follow pretty soon.
Meeting you neighbors
So, you moved into this street but people still don’t know you and you don’t know people. If you are lucky, you already know a person in the same street or at least in the city. Start by posting my address @registrartrek@glammr.us into the search field and click the “follow” button. Hi! Now my posts will appear in your timeline. You can do the same with @admin@world.museumsprojekte.de and all the posts from this blog will appear in your timeline.
That’s nice, but you already know me. You can click on my profile and see who I am following and who follows me. You might find some of those interesting and follow them, too.
But that’s the equivalent to inviting me to a housewarming party. You get to know a handful of people I know but this is by far not the whole neighborhood. You still don’t know which bakery makes the best croissants and which bar has decent margaritas, so to speak.
Next up, follow a few hashtags with stuff you are interested in. I still hope we can get #MuseumDocumentation to its old strength, for example. So, you type that in the search box and you will see people who have used it as well as a tab “hashtag”. If you click on that, you get a list of hashtags that contain the word, you can follow it and every post that contains #MuseumDocumentation will appear in your Home timeline. There is also #croissants and #SilentSunday, by the way. Hashtags make the world go round in this city of Mastodon so use them in your own posts and don’t be afraid of following many. You can still weed out later once your Home timeline gets too crowded.
Say “hi”
Next up you might want to tell everybody you moved here and who you are. For that, you might want to create a post about who you are, using the hashtag #introduction and tell people a bit about you. Don’t forget to add hashtags about stuff you are interested in, you might find like-minded folks you never thought about.
And since people might want to look at your profile to know you better and you don’t want to repeat yourself, you pin it to your profile. On most servers you can pin more than one post, on glammr.us you can pin up to five.
Oh, and don’t be afraid to just comment on someone else’s post you liked. This platform is much more driven by conversation than other places (more in the next section). Don’t be afraid to ask and talk to people.
Decentralized and no algorithm – what does it mean?
You might have heard that Mastodon is a decentralized network of independent servers and doesn’t have algorithms in place but it might be a bit nebulous what that means in your day-to-day interactions. So, here are some thoughts in a nutshell:
- The servers are run by individuals or groups who are mainly doing this with their own money without commercial interest. Which means you won’t see advertisement on most servers. Which is pretty unique in a day and age where even your operating system might try to sell you something.
- You might consider a donation to your server admin to help with the cost because of the first bullet point.
- Twitter and other company owned platforms operate with algorithms to prioritize some posts over others. Wonder why you see Musk’s face so often when you go to Twitter? Yeah, that’s the reason. They also analyze how often a post is liked and more likes get a higher priority than posts with fewer likes. On Mastodon that isn’t the case. Here, when you go to your timeline you see all the posts from people and hashtags you follow in chronological order, nothing else. Nobody is more important than the other.
- Elaborating on this: If you like a post on Mastodon what you do is you tell the one who has posted you liked what they said. Nothing more, nothing less. Your followers won’t get informed that you liked a post from somebody else.
- If you want your followers to see a post you found interesting, what you have to do is boost it. On twitter this was called retweeting, boosting is nothing else, it transports the post into the timeline of the people who follow you. Again, the only difference: no algorithm is looking how often a toot is boosted to shove it into someone’s face who doesn’t want to see it.
- Oh, by the way, you can actually edit posts, so if you became wiser after posting, for example because someone corrected you in a comment, you can happily go back to your original post and make the change. Those who have interacted with your post before will get notified of the change (if they haven’t disabled that option to declutter their notifications).
Culture
The atmosphere of Mastodon can vary depending on your server and who you follow. In general, I found it much more pleasant than on twitter but so far there are only a few museum professionals on, so I miss the active exchange that we had on there. But that is a question of who is active, it has nothing to do with the platform itself.
In general, there is a culture that values inclusion and this means that it is nearly like an unwritten rule to add alt-text when you post an image or gif so visually impaired people also get a sense of what your image is about.
If you post about sensitive topics – or even just a spoiler to a current TV episode or movie – there is a feature to place a Content Warning (CW) to your post. What it does: It displays just what you have written as a warning and your post only gets visible if you click on it. It might be mandatory to place content warnings for certain topics on your server. Check the about page to see them and make sure you follow them.
If you get harassed by another user, report the abusive post and it will reported to the administrator of your server who can then check and take appropriate measures. How this is handled varies by server so if this is just run by one person it might take longer than if your server has a moderation team. But, by and large, I found them far more responsive than in other places, especially since on some platforms hate speech, sexual harassment, sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, and lies are now acceptable behavior.
In conclusion
Although I wasn’t very active on the Mastodon account of Registrar Trek before I plan to be more in the future. But this, of course, will also depend on other people wanting to join in. See you there?
Angela
Footnotes/Further Readings
Fedi.Tips gives a good overview of features and how things are supposed to work.
A Beginner’s Guide to Mastodon by Tamilore Oladipo is also pretty good and adds a bit of context.
https://buffer.com/resources/mastodon-social
This is pretty much what I said in less words with some things I didn’t mention like private messaging.
